Checkup: Health news in brief

Published 4:35 pm, Friday, January 25, 2013

Flu vaccine and ear infections in kids

For many children, flu season means an increase in ear infections.

Although many people do not realize it, the middle ear has a direct link to the upper respiratory tract: the auditory, or eustachian, tube. Infections in the nose or sinus cavities thus can spread to the ear.

So does that mean that vaccinating against the flu might prevent ear infections in children? Some researchers think so.

In a report published in 2011, scientists pooled data from eight studies of 24,000 children between the ages of 6 months and 7 years. They found that those who received the FluMist vaccine, a nasal spray made with live but weakened flu virus, had a significantly lower risk of acute ear infections compared with children who received a placebo. Among children who got the flu, those who had been vaccinated had a 40 percent reduction in ear infections compared with children who were given a placebo.

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A study published last year also found the flu vaccine reduced acute ear infections in children. FluMist appears to be more effective than the shot, but scientists say more research is needed.

More than 1.66 million new cases of cancer will be diagnosed in 2013, while more than 580,000 Americans are expected to die of the disease, according to the annual statistics report of the American Cancer Society.

The report, released last week, notes that the overall death rate for cancer in the United States has declined significantly since 1991, primarily because of reductions in smoking and improved cancer screening. Data show that cancer deaths declined 20 percent from their peak in 1991 to 2009, the most recent date available.

According to the report, about half of all new cancers found in men will involve the prostate, lungs, colon and rectum. Among women, the three most common types of cancer that will be diagnosed are breast, lung and colorectal.

Although cancer rates are declining for most types of cancer, they are increasing among both sexes for melanoma of the skin and cancers of the liver, thyroid and pancreas.

Pregnancy increases the risk of venous thrombosis, which involves blood clots in the veins, and pulmonary embolism, a blood clot in the arteries of the lungs that can be fatal. The absolute risk is low — about 1 in 1,000 over an entire pregnancy. But a new study suggests that both kinds of clots may be more common in pregnancies achieved by in vitro fertilization.

Swedish researchers compared 23,498 women who had given birth after IVF from 1990 to 2008 with 116,960 women of the same age and general health who had natural pregnancies. The results appeared online last week in the journal BMJ.

Women with IVF pregnancies had more than four times the risk of venous thrombosis during the first trimester, compared with those with natural pregnancies, and almost seven times the risk of pulmonary embolism. The difference narrowed, but persisted, as the pregnancies progressed.

The IVF procedure induces multiple egg production with high doses of hormones, and the authors suggest that this may be the cause.